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Top Diabetes News of Today

BY SERENA GORDON: If you have type 2 diabetes and you want to do your heart a favor, a new study suggests you should let your diet get a little nutty.

Folks with type 2 diabetes who ate five or more servings of certain kinds of nuts weekly dropped their odds of heart disease by about 20 percent, compared to people who ate less than a serving a month. A serving in the study was defined as one ounce.

Noshing five or more weekly servings of nuts also appears to lower the risk of premature death from heart disease or any other cause by about one-third for people with type 2 diabetes. (read more)

BY MICHAEL O. SCHROEDER and KRISTINE CRANE: During pregnancy the body goes through many changes and requires more insulin, which helps with control of blood sugar levels. Such changes sometimes leave a woman vulnerable to developing gestational diabetes – a type of the disease that occurs only during pregnancy.

Screening for gestational diabetes – where commonly there aren’t any obvious signs or symptoms of the condition – is routinely done between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy. But some women who are at higher risk may be tested for preexisting diabetes at the first prenatal visit.

According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the chance of developing gestational diabetes is increased for those who: (read more)

BY JASON GOODYER: As far back as the 16th Century, dogs were used as guides for blind people. Since then, they’ve come to play a much wider role in healthcare.

Today, guide dogs have been joined by medical detection dogs that have been trained to sniff out cancer, along with various other medical conditions including type 1 diabetes, severe nut allergies and Addison’s disease (a rare disorder of the adrenal glands), and soon possibly even Parkinson’s disease and malaria as well. (read more)

BY YAHOO LIFESTYLE VIDEOS: It’s not every day that a rock musician — let alone Bret Michaels, best known as the bandana-clad frontman of the 80s rock band Poison — talks about finding “balance.” But for Michaels, who has type 1 diabetes, finding that balance can be a matter of life and death.

“Diabetes is a very complicated disease,” Michaels tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “When you’re diabetic, there’s this everyday balance. The pancreas is no longer secreting the amount of insulin you need to cover the food intake, your carb intake. This is an incurable disease. You treat it with medication and with doing the right thing to stay healthy.” (read more)

BY MONICA BEYER: New research has shown that impaired insulin signaling in the brain, often a feature of diabetes, may negatively impact cognition, mood, and metabolism — all of which are common aspects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Although the conditions are seemingly independent of each other, earlier studies have found that people with type 2 diabetes are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

However, the mechanisms behind this relationship have remained hidden. (read more)

Joan Biddle

Joan Biddle is a Content Developer at Diabetic Nation. Her years of editing, research and writing allow her to create detailed, reliable articles that help people navigate complicated topics. She enjoys movies, reading, poetry and art.